Swarm blamed on split in hive

STOCKTON - It came from over the center-field wall during the top of the fourth inning, a dark cloud headed straight for home plate.

Alex Breitler

STOCKTON - It came from over the center-field wall during the top of the fourth inning, a dark cloud headed straight for home plate.

Bees. Perhaps 20,000 of them.

Players dived into the dirt or sprinted for the dugout, while the public address announcer asked the crowd to stay calm.

"I just saw something fuzzy coming. And then I heard the buzzing. I thought, oh (expletive), bees!" Stockton Ports manager Webster Garrison said, recalling the dramatic five-minute interruption in Sunday afternoon's game. "I saw everybody hitting the deck and players running, and both dugouts scattering, fans starting to scatter. It was just a weird situation."

Not so weird to University of California, Davis, entomologist Eric Mussen, who calmly explained the whole thing Monday.

Somewhere very close to Stockton Ballpark, Mussen said, a honeybee colony must have grown so large that a split became necessary.

The queen was forced out, taking half of the bees with her. The other half stayed behind to be ruled by a daughter queen.

The outcast bees set off to find a new home. For reasons unknown, their route was right across the stadium.

It must have been quite a sight, Mussen said.

"When the bees are swarming, it's about the craziest thing you ever saw," he said. "There's this big mass of bees moving back and forth, up and down, forward and backward."

Not completely random, though. Swarms follow special "leader bees" that decide where to go.

In this case, that was right over the pitcher's mound and home plate, then over the top of the stadium and down to a tree in the parking lot.

The little tree leaned beneath the weight of all those bees, Ports President Pat Filippone said. Worried about public safety, team officials stuck yellow tape around the tree and even posted a guard there to keep fans out when the game ended.

The bees were still there the next morning. With another game in a matter of hours, the team took action Monday.

"The exterminator came out and zapped them," Filippone said.

The bee invasion was still a topic of conversation as the Ports took batting practice Monday afternoon.

Shortstop Michael Gilmartin said he didn't realize anything was wrong until he heard a buzzing around his head and ears. Someone yelled, "Get down!" Instead, he ran into the dugout of the visiting Modesto Nuts. None of his teammates gave him a hard time about that, Gilmartin said.

"No, absolutely not. Whatever you can do to not get stung," he said. "I don't think anybody's really had this happen to them before. Everybody's kind of laughing, making jokes about it."

The players who laid face-down on the field probably did the right thing, Mussen said. But no stings were reported, and there probably wasn't much danger to the public; these were ordinary honeybees that weren't looking to attack, he said.

"But if they're flying that close to you and you're standing there in the middle of the swarm, they could bump off of you," Mussen said. "If they got caught in your hair, worked into your scalp, you might get a sting.